At a glance, this suffragette sash held by the Fenimore Art Museum, is but one of many surviving examples of a national movement for women’s suffrage in the United States. However, while the sash features the colors purple and white, universally used in the American suffrage movement, the third color, which makes up the second stripe along the edge of the sash, appears to be a faded green. The inclusion of green in lieu of the typical gold, departs from the tricolor iconic of the women’s suffrage movement in the United States. It is this differentiation in the color of the sash that signifies a movement for women’s suffrage in the United States divided not only by usage of the colors gold and green but a militancy of tactics.

Sash, 1910-1920. New York State Historical Association, Cooperstown, New York, Gift of Rebecca Clark, N0147.1945 (02).

Gold became associated with the movement for women’s suffrage in the United States beginning with Elizbeth Cady Stanton and Susan S. Anthony’s use of the colors in a campaign to pass a suffrage referendum in Kansas in 1867. Soon after, suffragists of the National American Woman Suffrage Association led by Susan B. Anthony rallied gold pins, ribbons, sashes, and yellow roses to their cause declaring “the more who wear it, the greater our strength will be.”[1]

Juxtaposing the use of gold by more moderate organizations, were the colors of purple, white, and green synonymous with the women’s suffrage movement in the United Kingdom and the militant Woman’s Social and Political Union.[2] This British tricolor was adopted by certain suffrage organizations within the United States including Harriot Stanton Blatch’s Women’s Political Union and other American suffrage organizations to signify the militancy they shared with their British counterparts.[3] The tendency of these militant organizations for violent protest led more moderate groups to disassociate themselves from such tactics through the adoption of an American tricolor similar in the inclusion of purple and white with green replaced by gold.[4]

Purple, white, and gold began to feature prominently in suffrage campaigns across the United States and soon became associated with the American women’s suffrage movement as a whole.[5] So ostracized was the color green within the American women’s suffrage movement, when Alice Paul’s more radical National Women’s Party declared its official colors in 1913, they included purple, white and the American gold in lieu the color green.[6] The “Votes for Women” sash with its inclusion of the color green and exclusion of the more iconic gold represents an allegiance of the wearer to a level of militancy generally dissociated with the movement for women’s suffrage in the United States through the exclusion of green from the American tricolor.